Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is appointing an acting director at the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) when Ronen Bar leaves the position on Sunday, a source in the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office informed Hebrew media on Thursday.
The deputy director will fill Bar’s role until the government completes the appointment process of nominee Maj. Gen. David Zini, or after a month, whichever should come first, the government source said.
The decision to appoint the temporary director, whom Israel dubbed “S,” was made in conjunction with Israeli Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara, the latter’s office stated.
Baharav-Miara said she green-lighted the move “given the exceptional circumstances” while also considering “the vital need to prevent harm to national security.” She also ordered the prime minister to transfer his authority to appoint a permanent director to a different minister, “who will act without delay to appoint a permanent head of the Shin Bet.”
Baharav-Miara has claimed that Netanyahu has a conflict of interest in appointing a new Shin Bet head due to ongoing criminal probes into several former and current employees of the Prime Minister’s Office.
“It is possible to assign the role to the proposed candidate, as requested, for a period of one month,” the attorney-general concluded Thursday.
During the month that “S” will lead the Shin Bet, the position of deputy director will be filled by another person that Israel named as “M.” The latter ISA officer, who currently serves on the negotiating team for a hostage deal with Hamas, has previously served as the agency’s second-in-command between 2021 and 2024.
Bar announced on April 28 that he was stepping down on June 15, citing personal responsibility for the failure to prevent the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which left approximately 1,200 people dead and saw 251 hostages taken into Gaza.
The move by Bar was widely regarded as a political attempt to avert a constitutional crisis amid court petitions against Netanyahu’s March 16 announcement that he would be seeking dismissal.
Last month, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that Netanyahu’s government violated the law when it fired Bar due to its “lack of trust” in the internal security chief. However, in light of his decision to end his term, the court did not order the government to take any action in response to its ruling.
In an affidavit submitted to the top court in April, Netanyahu accused Bar of leading the “greatest security failure” in the country’s history.
“The operational principles set by Bar in the summary of the security discussion he held an hour and 15 minutes before the [Oct. 7, 2023] massacre are the greatest intelligence failure in the history of Israel,” wrote the premier in an affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court.
“Bar’s claim that he warned of war and alerted the entire system is false. He did not alert the prime minister, nor the minister of defense, nor the emergency response teams and security coordinators in the kibbutzim, and he did not order the evacuation of the Nova party,” Netanyahu said.